A recent traffic stop gone awry, resulting in the driver being subdued with a Taser gun, led us to ask Melanie Trimble, director of the Capital Region Chapter of the New York Civil Liberties Union, about a motorist’s rights when stopped by police.

NEW SCOTLAND —Two months after Watervliet’s school superintendent called the Watervliet Police with concerns about the officer stationed at the high school, he was charged with criminal sexual acts against female students.

After Summer Smith died last Jan. 9, her mother and her young son went through her box of special keepsakes. In the box was an edition of The Altamont Enterprise devoted to the aftermath of a 2000 crash on Hurst Road that killed two teens and wounded a third. The kids had been hotboxing — driving while stoned.

Summer, then a 17-year-old Guilderland High School senior, was friends with a classmate who died in the crash. She raised money for a bronze angel statue to stand in Altamont’s village green. “The angel represents people who have lost people,” Summer told us then.

Her mother, Kristin Smith-Hoin, finds both irony and comfort in the keepsake. Summer died of a drug overdose. She was 31.

A Facebook video of a New Scotland traffic stop, shown by local television news shows and picked up by the liberal activist news service Alternet.org with the headline, “Cop can’t wait for his backup to arrive so he could needlessly tase a nonviolent man,” has raised questions about the danger of traffic stops for officers and about th